Dire Climate Warnings Not Happening

Jeff Judson is a public policy consultant and member of the Board of Directors of The Heartland Institute.

Judson is the former president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Under his leadership the TPPF became one of the largest and most influential free market state think tanks in the U.S. and became known for its influence on public opinion, the news media, state legislators and top elected officials, a fact acknowledged by major newspapers in the state. In the year 2002 alone, TPPF earned over $17 million in statewide news media coverage.

The United Nations-sponsored International Panel on Climate Change is about to release its 2013 report, but details already are leaking out. Apparently, there are admissions that the dire global warming predictions from the IPCC 2007 report of rising sea levels, more frequent and severe hurricanes and vanishing sea ice — all caused by human activity — are not happening.

Not allowing facts to get in the way of its agenda, the Obama EPA just released its new power plant regulations, which will effectively end the use of coal in new power plants and force consumers to pay higher electricity rates, predicated on coal’s contribution to climate change. But that conclusion is now almost impossible for any honest person to reach.

There is no dispute that CO2 levels are rising in the atmosphere. But science proves that CO2 levels — which make up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere — are not the cause of warming or of other changes in the climate. Natural cycles driven largely by the sun and complex systems of forcings and feedbacks account for such changes.

But as Dick Armey once said, “Conservatives believe it when they see it; liberals see it when they believe it.” Consistent with this axiom, climate change alarmists, who believe that humans are destroying the Earth and its atmosphere, cannot suspend their belief even as the peer-reviewed science to the contrary mounts.

This month, a group of leading independent scientists from around the world released a comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed global warming studies. Known as the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and published by The Heartland Institute, the 1,000 page study (available here) is a significant contribution to the debate (for those who want a debate). Just a few of the findings include:

The Earth has not warmed for the past 16 years, and has even cooled in some areas, despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2. Given the preponderance of alarmist climate models that predicted significant warming, this fact alone should be reason enough for regulators and scientists to reassess their conclusions.

The United Nations-sponsored IPCC predictions of atmospheric methane and warming due to water vapor have now proven grossly inaccurate.

The sun is the primary source of heat on Earth (you don’t say) and humans are not the primary source of CO2 on Earth, contributing only 7 billion tons of industrial carbon dioxide compared with natural sources that produce 200 billion tons annually.

Ancient ice core samples show that temperature changes and CO2 levels are not correlated. The data prove a close correlation between climate patterns and solar activity — not human activity — over the last few hundred years. IPCC models do not adequately consider important solar factors.

Models predicted that warming should have occurred toward both poles but has only occurred at the North Pole. In fact, Antarctic sea ice may be at an all-time high, having increased almost 60 percent since 2007.

Having published these findings, the next thing readers will see are the usual claims from the left to try to discredit the Heartland study (rather than address the science). Get ready for assertions that the NIPCC study was paid for by big oil, the coal industry, or power companies (it wasn’t), or that the people who wrote the study aren’t scientists (but they are).

Actually, it is shameful how little funding the oil, coal and power industries have put into seeking truth in this debate. Instead, they have chosen not to fight for truth and some have even sought new ways to profit in the false, alternative energy, “green” market created by government subsidies and mandates.

But the truth is winning and has already stopped climate-change mandates in the U.S. Congress and a growing list of other countries, most recently Australia, which is repealing its entire carbon tax regime. Eventually, the truth wins.